The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins by Devin Griffiths (review)

Devin Griffiths’s multifaceted, richly textured The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins argues that the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new mode of engaging with history—“comparative historicism”—that increasingly fostered what Griffiths calls a “flat” view of temporal existence (4, 245). According to this view, the present is not hierarchically set above the past, on a higher level of development in an ongoing narrative of teleological progress; rather, from the perspective of “comparatism,” the present and the past, as well as various moments in the past, exist alongside each other, within the same open-ended continuum of interwoven events, actions, works, and story lines that could be seen as both similar and different (4). For Griffiths, nineteenth-century novels and long poems, especially the fictional writings of Walter Scott, had a major share in the processes through which this model of historical thinking came to be established. The engaging chapter on Scott, which seeks to elucidate the impact of his works on the nineteenth-century “historical imagination,” can therefore be seen as foundational to the book’s key points (87).

While Griffiths is keen to emphasize that his study was supposed to be chiefly focused on modes of understanding history, it seems, actually, to have wider concerns that (in consonance with the comparative method it examines) bring the worlds of nineteenth-century literature and science in touch with recent theories of what is often broadly referred to as new materialist thought. Thus, as one learns at the end of the chapter on Charles Darwin (the final one of the book), “the most important” general goal of The Age of Analogy is to make the case for a “flat ontology” that corresponds, in turn, to a “flat epistemology” (255). This egalitarian epistemology entails a way of knowing, as Griffiths suggests, that does not place the investigator above the matter to be investigated, but by the side of it, on the same plane. It follows that this method tends to unravel not only the hierarchy between the present and the past, but also that between subjects and objects, the self and the other, or human and non-human life.

The concept of analogy—along with the concomitant practice of comparison—supplies Griffiths with a perspective as well as a vocabulary to trace various manifestations of this “flat epistemology” through the works of Erasmus Darwin, Scott, Alfred Tennyson, George Eliot, and Charles Darwin, to each of whom the book dedicates one of its five main chapters. These chapters are preceded by a general introduction and, subsequently, a more specific prelude, in the latter of which Griffiths serves up a dense mixture of heterogeneous theorems, both old and new, in order to establish a distinction between what he calls “formal” and “harmonic” analogy (33). Typically, an analogy, as Griffiths points out, consists of two “sets of relations,” which are brought in correspondence with each other (“A is to B as C is to D”) (31, 18). In formal analogies, however, one of these two parts, which serves as the source, is projected onto the other, which serves as the target. By contrast, in harmonic analogies, the relationship between the two components is not predefined but only emerges from the activity through which they become involved with each other. Harmonic analogies, in short, engender new grounds for comparison, giving rise to “singular instances of pattern,” while formal analogies regenerate patterns that are already in place (38).

A good example for the creative function of harmonic analogy can be found in the chapter on Charles Darwin, which, among other things, contains an intriguing study of Darwin’s use of pencils as a means to demonstrate that orchids are, as he believed, fertilized by insects. Suggestively, Darwin deployed pencils not only to simulate the pollination of orchids, but also to sketch illustrations as well as to write and edit texts about this process. In this...